Living a life unlike any other, a life of pain and sorrows, he woke up each day to escape nightmares only to find himself living a bigger nightmare.
What was it that defined the bleakness in his eyes? Thought by many, few understood the absurdity of this stance.
Racing on the empty roads of Lahore as fast as his life had taken away his pleasures only to replace them with pain, Rahil was oblivious to everything around him, oblivious to the orange-smokerman trying to do his spell on the road with his broom, oblivious to the little girls walking in their blue gown like shirts and white scarfs to the government schools and even oblivious to the music that made his car vibrate with its loudness until he found himself outside the Model Town park. To many it might just be a place to go for a walk but to him it was a lot more, to him it meant a flashback through to what he had escaped for the past one year.
Sitting in the chilly air of the morning surrounded by glistening amber leaves, he looked like a statue held together by forces of memories.
“To unsaid words, unanswered glances and unkept pacts, to broken friendships and rotten promises and to love shattered between forevers”
He thought to himself with a look that said more than it intended to, a look that reflected pain of an intensity unlike any other. Breaking his trance, he heard the laughter of children running around him. Laughter wounded his ears, whispers from the devilish darkness of his fate. Voices mocked at his helplessness as he saw his wife’s smiling face around him and felt his son’s grasp around his shoulders. Tears blinded his eyes, eyes that saw the pain they couldn’t stop playing as his mind was clogged with thoughts.
A year ago, December 3rd 2013; yes, he clearly remembered that was the date; how could he ever forget that night? The night when life deprived him of not only his reason to live but also of his reason to smile, to stand up and move forward each day in hope and to love like he had never loved and he would never again.
Gunshots.
Blood.
Sad pain and frustrated fascinations of the devil.
Walking home after a day full of fun and joy, he had never pictured himself pedaling the faintly coloured boat in the tarnished waters of the lake with his son for the last time; he had never thought that it was actually the last time he had walked on that jogging track with his wife, hand in hand, under that twilight sky. He had never imagined any of that but then again how many of us imagine things to go wrong until we actually get to taste the tragic side of life? Not many and unfortunately Rahil was one of them.
Faint images started to appear in front of his eyes as he drove back home with a similar twilight falling over the rush stricken road. Images of those two men coming in front of them on their motorbike. Images of the silent street which a minute before was only echoing with the laughter of his son, Musa. Images of them demanding for the money he didn’t have on that one day and finally the images of them shooting his son as he tried to prevent them from touching his wife. She was his and he was hers.What right did an outsider have to touch her, to humiliate her and objectify her? Only they didn’t understand that and it was this lack of morality which flowed into the puddles at the side of that road in the shape of Musa’s blood. Tears blinded him as he heard his wife’s shrieking screams breaking past his ear drums, making him oblivious to all voices around him. He could feel his nerves stretch as if they were ready to burst- the moment they shot his lamenting wife to shut her up forever over her shock- her pain at the loss of a six year old son. That guiltless look in their eyes, that shocked one in his blood stricken ones. Haunting horrors of the past made him see nothing, hear nothing and taste nothing other than the guilt of not being able to save his family as his car raced faster than it should’ve. Fast enough to make him come to point of feeling nothing with his head bleeding and his pain relieved.
To the world, it was an instant and he was gone but to him it was more than a matter of instants. It was a matter of living like a dead corpse for one whole year. One whole year of guilt, of pain, of flashbacks, of hideous memories, of tear stained pillows, of hollowness of existence- of everything but happiness.
